The principal works that have emerged from our stimulating project on ‘Early Tantra’ are critical editions and translations of previously unpublished primary material, which have begun to appear in this new series. This volume complements those publications by gathering together some of the fruits, direct and indirect, of the wide-ranging discussions that took place during the project’s workshops. By way of introduction, the volume opens with an attempt by the editors to draw together our findings about the “shared ritual syntax” of some of the earliest known works of the tantric traditions, with a particular emphasis on the Buddhist Mañjuśriyamūlakalpa and the Śaiva Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā. Seven further contributions, by Dominic Goodall, Peter Bisschop, Judit Törzsök, Diwakar Acharya, Anna A. Ślączka, Libbie Mills and Péter-Dániel Szántó, throw light on a wide range of topics : the Śaivatattvas and their evolution, yoginī-temples, alphabet-deities, an early treatise of snake-related magic, iconographic prescriptions in early pratiṣṭhātantras, the implications of the use of the bhūtasaṅkhyā system, and a fragment of a Buddhist tantric sādhana.

After studies in Oxford and in Hamburg, Dominic Goodall passed several years working in Pondicherry, where he was head of the Pondicherry Centre of the École française d’Extrême-Orient from 2002 to 2011. He has published critical editions of Śaiva works and of classical Sanskrit poetry (most recently, with Csaba Dezső, the eighth-century Kuṭṭanīmata of Dāmodaragupta). After four years in Paris, where he gave lectures on Indian and Cambodian Sanskrit literature at the École pratique des hautes études (religious science section), he is now back once again in Pondicherry.

Harunaga Isaacson studied in Groningen (MA 1990) and was awarded a PhD in Sanskrit by the University of Leiden in 1995. After holding positions for research and teaching at the Universities of Oxford, Hamburg and Pennsylvania, he was appointed Professor of Classical Indology in the Department of Indian and Tibetan Studies, Asien-Afrika-Institut, Hamburg, in 2006. His main research areas are: tantric traditions in pre-13th-century South Asia, especially Vajrayāna Buddhism; classical Sanskrit poetry; classical Indian philosophy; and Purāṇic literature.